Musings from Newbies in one of the Club’s Friendliest Fleet

WORDS: SARAH JOHNSON AND STEVEN MOLYNEUX-WEBB

An afternoon chat at the Club… and in the blink of an eye we bought a boat…! Read on for some reflections on how it has gone so far.

It started with the Middle Island 1 and 2 dinghy course – I got the bug and wanted to keep sailing. So, I hunted through the Club’s fleet webpages, and found the Flying Fifteens’ site, which said “turn up on a Saturday afternoon for a chat”, (really?) and so Steve (my partner) and I did. Hovering tentatively in the boatyard, we met Tim Roberts and Edith Fernandez from the fleet who talked us through the boat: a 15-foot 2-person keelboat with all the fun of a dinghy. And then they mentioned that one was for sale…

That was pretty much it: we met the owner who took us out for a spin, and we had a blast! With only two of you on board the Fifteen, you have to be very hands on, and you learn super-fast – we loved it. Frankly we had been imagining any boat-owning future to involve a comfortable cruiser, island day trips and glasses of wine in hand, but something about the physicality of the design captured our hearts. It helped that the fleet were a really friendly bunch – the enthusiasm and support was probably our biggest single persuader.

So, within a month of our first chat, we’d applied for Club membership and – soon after – bought the boat! And then the racing started – opening up a whole new world of challenges…

Challenge 1: Complete the course

Honestly, I was a bit nervous at even the thought of racing. Moving from Middle Island learning – with an instructor on a RIB who comes to fish you out if you capsize – to being alone, trying to navigate an invisible course across the harbour, was a bit intense! For the first couple of races, we just followed alongside the fleet with the harbour chart before we even tried to participate… it can be a challenge at first just to work out the course, where the marks were, and the correct way to follow it. People said “if in doubt, just follow Howard”… but as we learned, it turns out sometimes even he sees the wrong number!

Challenge 2: Still be talking to your crew mates at the end of the course

More challenging even than working out the harbour, was sharing that understanding. Steve (helm) and I (crew) have been together for 10 years, but somehow sailing has this special ability to make communication struggle spectacularly. “Sheet in!”… “which sheet?”… “THAT one”… “Watch out for the mark – this one?”… “I can’t see it through you!”… “The Mark!”… “SHEET!”… Bang… “Why weren’t you watching the Mark?!”… [Sorry E1!]

it? What crazy angle do you need to sail to make headway at full flow? And the end, oh the end… Hours later at the bar, we saw that race management actually wrote us down on the docket as being done, but then we took a further 41 minutes (!!!) and two other boats passed us before we actually crossed the line, agonising back and forth and not realising you need to go practically to the North wall to get around the wind hole. So we learned – slowly – that you need some understanding of the harbour to race well. The Etchells gave an awesome harbour race webinar which explains some of the technicalities – I still don’t understand it, but I hope to one day.

Challenge 4: Become a boat engineer despite having absolutely no skills

People told us from early on to “make the boat our own”. What does this even mean, I thought? It turns out that owning and racing a boat means understanding how it is put together and how it runs. You need tools that suit you to decide what angle the mast should be at for the conditions, what kind of sheets you like, how to check the angle of your jib exhaust, etc etc – it’s like an endless cornucopia of learning. So we started taking bits apart (and sometimes remembering how to put them back together), buying parts and talking to encyclopedias like Ollie Merz and Pete Britten, and slowly crafting a boat that sails well for us. It turns out that no matter what you do, the boat is never ever quite finished – a perfectionist’s nightmare.

Challenge 5: Avoid getting crushed in a club race

Our first Club race was the One Global Tomes Cup. My oh my, a Fifteen feels tiny compared to the big boats! I remember our first upwind leg, and a TP52 crossing us with so much pace that their wind shadow hit us like someone had turned off the weather. Club races, it turns out, tend to get a bit ‘compressed’ around the marks, requiring a very different type of boat handling! My learning for those moments: keep focusing on the things you’re responsible for, and let Steve worry about how close the encircling spinnaker poles and bowsprits are getting to impaling him.

Challenge 6: Keep going back even after a bad day

When you first start to race, it can be a bit demotivating being constantly at the back of the fleet, or getting things wrong, or if something jams and you have to stop for the day. For me my confidence was also knocked on days with really strong winds where I just couldn’t control the sails or balance the boat like I normally can. But the fleet were awesome at encouraging, offering a friendly word, talking through what went wrong, sharing what they did right and wrong that day. Much of the joy of sailing is that everyone is always learning, and no matter what level you are, you can always learn from others!

Challenge 7: Enjoy a sunset romance… or a marathon horror story?

With the season over we gave the Sunset Series a try, and we learned that the best way to start the weekend is with a Friday after-work sail. Or is it? Some evenings – awesome. Others – our friend the wind seemed to have gone home early, and it was more of a sit and swelter. But with a beer in hand, the imminent start of the weekend and beautiful sunsets on the harbour, we felt pretty lucky.

Challenge 8: Re-name your boat without becoming forever cursed by Poseidon

We wanted to give the boat our own name, and learned there is a tradition to name Fifteens with two “F”s in the name. It turns out that the obvious ones are all taken! When we finally picked our name, 飛帆, and were ready to share it, I was suddenly warned “you must do this properly or the boat will be cursed”. Tongue-in-cheek or not, several YouTube videos later we were ready for our renaming ceremony, complete with a special bell, and a great excuse for a few gallons of Champagne with the rest of the fleet!

飛帆 in pinyin is Fei Faan (which gets us a double “F”). The calligraphy translation in traditional Chinese means “flying sailboat” but the pronunciation if written in simplified characters also means “extraordinary” which is why we went for traditional over simplified characters to keep the double meaning for a Hong Kong boat!

It’s clearly been quite the journey already, and some of our best moments so far include: • When a fish leapt into the boat in the last 60 seconds before a race start and no matter what I tried I couldn’t grab hold of it’s slippery wriggling-ness to return it to safety – it’s hard to start well when you’re laughing so hard!

• Coming 4th! Actually, we held 2nd until about a minute before the line but then that speedy Sam Chan squeezed us out on a tack and left us downwind of swift David Chow too with seconds to go…

• Learning from the fleet: everyone has been so friendly and so encouraging. There’s a great group of people, training days, helping hands for maintenance sessions or buying new sails, or whatever question you have.

What’s next? Well, it seems I need to do some helming. Which leads me to my top tip: if you see me helming – steer clear :)

Finally, a huge thanks to all of the Flying Fifteen Fleet, and my Introductory Scheme mentor Dennis Chien for supporting us on the journey!

IMAGE: GUY NOWELL IMAGE: ALEXANDER FEENIE